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Zero energy ready homes are coming

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Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#261

Post by 0x53 »

rr888 wrote: post #222
pchristensen wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is questioning that people want to live in suburbs. People object to the government power preventing any additional development in these low density areas. These areas are desirable, but economically uncompetitive.

> economically uncompetitive How can you say that? Usually nice suburbs pay huge amount in taxes that subsidize urban cores.

I think this is incorrect. One way to think about it is that usually infrastructure costs scale with distance. So you need much less infrastructure per person in dense places. However, everyone pays the same tax rate (or more in dense areas because the property values are higher) which means that in reality the dense areas usually subsidize the suburbs.

There is a company (urbanthree.com) that does financial modeling and produces heat maps to show the net gain/loss of a city based on area. They routinely find that the denser areas are financially solvent and supporting the city and the suburbs are not solvent.

https://www.urbanthree.com/services/revenue-modeling/

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#262

Post by xthrown1 »

IncRnd wrote: post #226
xthrown1 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of US taxes come from cities. It's the hinterlands that are free riding on the US armed forces.

> It's the hinterlands that are free riding on the US armed forces. Yet. "In every region of the country, recruitment rates were higher in rural and exurban counties than in urban counties. Only urban counties in the South had recruitment rates above the national average. Cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West all had rates well below the national average." [1] [1] https://dailyyonder.com/largest-share-army-recrui…

[flagged]

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#263

Post by Baeocystin »

paganel wrote: post #213
Baeocystin wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost half of Americans live in an earthquake zone. Wood is a hell of a lot safer than masonry or rammed earth in such conditions.

> Almost half of Americans live in an earthquake zone Apart from CA and maybe some other parts further North where is that earthquake zone? Seriously asking.

A lot more of the continent than most people think!

Further reading:

https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/nearly-half-america...

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#264

Post by sbierwagen »

paganel wrote: post #89

Crazy how the Americans try to create "zero energy homes" (whatever that means) using basically wood structures. Wood is a very, very bad heat insulator. The best proven heat insulator when it comes to building a home is earth itself, that's why for hundreds to thousands of years dug-out huts have been the norm on several continents, for different cultures/civilisations. Granted, you cannot build a macmansion-like ho…

>The 1556 Shaanxi earthquake (Postal romanization: Shensi), known in Chinese colloquially by its regnal year as the Jiajing Great Earthquake "嘉靖大地震" (Jiājìng Dàdìzhèn) occurred in the early morning of 23 January 1556 in Huaxian, Shaanxi during the Ming dynasty.

>Most of the residents there lived in yaodongs—artificial caves in loess cliffs—which collapsed and buried alive those sleeping inside. Modern estimates put the direct deaths from the earthquake at over 100,000, while over 700,000 migrated away or died from famine and plagues, which summed up to a total loss of 830,000 people in Imperial records.[3][4][5] It was the deadliest recorded earthquake in history, and in turn one of the deadliest natural disasters in Chinese history.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1556_Shaanxi_earthquake

You might also ask people in Turkey, where at least 50,000 people have died so far, what they think of masonry structures.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#265

Post by dahfizz »

londons_explore wrote: post #103
Syonyk wrote: post #28

When you've confused "per kWh cost" with "energy to the house delivery costs," this sort of stuff sounds good on paper, but it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem that in the winter, homes use a lot more energy than they can generate, and in the spring/fall, they will generate a lot more energy than they need. I've got a large ground mount solar install I put in a few years ago (15.9kW nameplate, though mostly ea…

This isn't a problem as long as your grid does dynamic minute by minute pricing. When the price of power drops to zero in the spring/fall, you can be sure there will be plenty of people lapping it up to smelt aluminium, make glass, make steel, make cement, liquify air, make hydrogen, etc. When the price of power is high in the winter, companies will swoop in with gas turbines, power cables from other places, and extr…

> Power hungry industries will become seasonal or migratory too.

Electricity will have to become orders of magnitude more expensive for this to be true. After you've bought the building, the smelter, and the guy to operate it, the cost of electricity to smelt aluminum is negligible. Its never going to make sense to leave all that idle if the cost of electricity bumps up a few cents.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#266

Post by bluGill »

cma wrote: post #234
johnweldon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in…

That's on an individual basis, but it can have collective side effects. For example, most would rather a personal car rather than the bus, but that makes bus stops less frequent due to less ridership which then makes cars even more desireable. Or flight from urban crime to the suburbs then makes urban crime more likely for the remaining people, who then have more reasons to flee.

Would they prefer the car, or is it just that the bus with poor routing and infrequent service is not a viable alternative and those in charge waste a ton of money which makes useful expansions not affordable.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#267

Post by djrobstep »

snow_mac wrote: post #235
johnweldon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in…

Why the hell would I live in an American city? I live in Colorado. Denver is our 'city', there is no parking, no room for my 2 dogs and my kid would not have a giant backyard to play in. Instead, I have a 3400 sq ft house on 10,000 sq ft of land with giant trees everywhere. I'm within 2 miles of lightrail, that I will never use. I work from home, I have a home office with a indoor, led powered garden with fresh fruit…

> I hate driving in Denver. The traffic sucks.

> Why is walkable so desired? When it's cold (like today) I don't want to leave my car. I'd drive through any day, I'd drive just to avoid walking half a mile.

This is an amazing example of the terrible disease that is Car Brain.

Instead of having a walkable city where you can walk to the shops/gym/restaurants, take convenient public transport to the theatre, and take the kids/dog to the park next door, live in a massive isolated bunker, drive your massive pickup truck to buy groceries, and wonder why the city is so congested with cars and trucks all doing the same thing. Madness.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#268

Post by bluGill »

johnweldon wrote: post #190
babypuncher wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are able to make that choice because we pretty heavily subsidize it for them. Rural communities receive a disproportionately large amount of federal aid per capita in order to build and maintain the infrastructure that makes that lifestyle possible. If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.

> pretty heavily subsidize Is a pretty general term that's hard to respond to. Yes there are rural subsidies, but I'm unconvinced that the per-capita subsidization of rural and suburban dwellers is so much greater than their urban counterparts. You may have a very good argument, but I don't know the numbers, and I haven't seen anyone provide the numbers for this yet either.

Rural areas have such a tiny population that the subsidy going to them is mostly used by urban folks.

If your food goes over a subsidized road that counts against you.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#269

Post by twblalock »

babypuncher wrote: post #179
johnweldon wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, people will always choose to spend money living as close to their ideal as they can, with the resources they are able to give toward it. The fact that so many people choose to live in suburbs, or the "sticks", suggests that there is something desirable to _them_ about living there. I.e. the same spending power required to live in a house in the suburbs, or rurally, could usually be used to live in…

They are able to make that choice because we pretty heavily subsidize it for them. Rural communities receive a disproportionately large amount of federal aid per capita in order to build and maintain the infrastructure that makes that lifestyle possible. If the individual cost of buying a house "in the sticks" was reflective of that, people might start to think twice.

It's important not to conflate "suburbs" and "rural."

For example, most of the Santa Clara Valley is suburban, consisting of subdivisions of detached homes with front yards, driveways, garages etc. But the area is definitely not rural: millions of people live here and 4 of the 5 FAANG companies are headquartered here.

You could say similar things about LA, or the areas outside Chicago and NYC, etc. They are definitely suburban, and definitely not rural.

Re: Zero energy ready homes are coming

#270

Post by beebmam »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #208

Contrary to what I am seeing in comments on HN, this is not just for single family detached housing. If you go to the ZERH website, under Program Requirements it says: Versions 1 and 2, Single Family, Multifamily, and Manufactured Homes https://www.energy.gov/eere/buildings/zero-energy-ready-home... Additionally, one of the photos in the featured article has the following caption: Lopez Community Land Trust built thi…

It seems unbelievably stupid to me to build solar panel based homes where I live: the northwest US.

Makes a heck of a bunch of sense in CA or TX though.

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